Global Distribution Systems Research Articles

ICT and the Changing Landscape of Global Tourism Distribution

The travel and tourism sector has emerged as one of the most important sectors for developing as well as developed countries. Tourism incorporates many of the features of the information society such as globalization, mobility and information richness. People from all nations, social rank, professions are potential tourists. Tourism links a worldwide supplier community with consumers, equally distributed worldwide. Its physical and virtual networks enable worldwide travelling, bringing together very distant cultures and habits. The industry is diverse, the size of tourism principals varies from micro to global enterprises. While some are fragmented, other parts, like the airlines, are concentrated into an oligopoly of global alliances. Information systems (IS) in tourism have been among the pioneers of leading edge technology applications: Computer Reservation Systems (CRS) or Global Distribution Systems (GDS) have been among the first international inter-organizational systems. Yield management systems a...

FUTURE RESEARCH NEEDS IN POSTHARVEST BIOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY OF FRUITS

Great advances have been made in postharvest technology of fresh fruits and their products based on our improved understanding of postharvest biology during the past 20 years. The most useful technological changes in the production, harvesting, and postharvest handling systems have resulted from interdisciplinary research approaches. This will likely continue to be the case in the future. Concurrently we need to expand our efforts in extending the available information about optimum production, harvesting, and postharvest handling procedures to producers, handlers, marketers, and consumers. Quality (especially textural and flavour attributes) and safety assurance must be the focus of future research and development. Examples of future research needs include production of new genotypes, using molecular biology techniques, with better flavour quality, slower softening rate, lower browning potential, and less susceptibility to physiological disorders and to decay-causing pathogens; and development of a postharvest integrated pest management program for fruits that combines biological, chemical, and physical control methods. We should continue research and development efforts aimed at improving the efficiency and reducing the cost of transportation and other components of the global and national distribution systems for fresh horticultural perishables.

The Internet as a Distribution Channel

The internet has become an extension of hotel chains' global distribution systems (GDSs). It offers three particular strategic possibilities: (1) to drive revenues by extending the company's reach to broader, more global markets, (2) to reduce costs by bypassing traditional distribution channels (e.g., airline GDSs), avoiding commissions, and lowering transaction fees, and (3) to enhance customer service by providing more and better information with multimedia. The potential of the market for guests' booking their own rooms is considerable, and electronic bookings are generally less expensive to complete than those from other channels, notably toll-free telephone lines. The technology is new enough that many difficulties remain, however. Of the top-ten sites maintained by luxury hotel operators, for instance, none provided for real-time, online reservations. Midscale and economy operators have been able to make better progress in online reservations, in part because their rooms are more uniform than those of luxury operators. Purchasers of corporate travel are able to use electronic booking to monitor and gain better control of their travel expenses. Hotel chains that assist corporate travel departments in this effort, through direct connections, can benefit. Prospects for group sales remain in the future, because the design of GDS and internet software does not yet capture the many complications of room-block and meetingroom purchases. Meeting planners can, however, find meeting-related information on the internet. Among other shortcomings of the internet are the overwhelming volume of information available and concerns about the security of data transmission and storage. Perhaps the greatest challenge of electronic distribution is achieving some form of competitive advantage from GDSs and web sites—since so much of today's technology is easily copied. Finally, no precise formula exists for how a particular hotel operation should allocate its resources for electronic commerce. That determination stems from the hotel's overall marketing strategy.

Hotel Sales-and-Marketing Management

This study of 200 hotels looked at eight areas of hotel sales-and-marketing management: advertising, department finances, franchise-affiliation benefit, human resources, revenue management, sales-contract terms, technology use, and third-party reservations. Approximately 60 percent of the hotels used both total revenue and room-nights sold as sales-performance measures, and 78 percent used room revenue to calculate bonuses. It seems that franchise-affiliated hotels receive greater benefit from the national reservation system than from the national sales offices. Close to 80 percent of the hotels use a yield-management system, about 75 percent are linked to a global distribution system, and many are represented on worldwideweb sites. At the local level, print media appear to be perceived by GMs and sales managers as offering the greatest reach for the fewest dollars.

The clock and control signal distribution system for the NA48 experiment

In the NA48 experiment at CERN, several detector subsystems located at distances of up to 200 m between each other produce data on a continuous basis and feed them into pipelines. Triggers are produced after variable delay times by two different systems for charged and for all-neutral kaon decays. To allow the retrieval of the corresponding data from the various subsystems and their merging into complex events by means of timestamps, a special, highly stable global clock distribution system has been developed. The design principles and the setup of the clock system are described and results for clock stability monitoring and automated correction of the signal transmission speed are reported.

Global Distribution Systems

A field study of 33 Canadian and Belgian travel agencies has allowed us to identify various factors determining the use and advantages obtained of global distribution systems (GDS) in the tourism industry. These systems include Galileo (13 agencies), Sabre (12), Worldspan (6) and Amadeus (2). Determinants of the behavior and perception of the travel agencies toward their GDS were found to be the organizational context of GDS implementation, the sophistication of the GDS as an inter-organizational information system, and the sophistication of the firm’s own organizational information system.

Technology transfer for African tourism

The World Tourism Organization (WTO), in cooperation with the Côte d'Ivoire Ministry of Tourism and Handicraft, organized a seminar on ‘Tourism and new information technologies: Global Distribution Systems’ at the political capital, Yamoussoukro. The aim of the seminar was to transfer knowledge on the subject to the public and private sectors of African tourism and it was attended by tourism ministers and executives from 27 African states as well as by entrepreneurs, academics and students.

Some Questions of Ethics related to Global Distribution Systems

Some Questions of Ethics related to Global Distribution Systems

Climate alteration A global issue for the electric power industry in the 21st century

Development of global electric generation and distribution systems will be central to mankind's economic and social well being. However, electricity is likely to be produced mainly from fossil fuel combustion for the foreseeable future. As a consequence, this global energy sector will contribute to growing carbon dioxide emissions, with a potential for climate alteration. Concern for potentially adverse climate effects has led to consideration of strategies for managing GHG emissions. With present technologies, extreme reduction strategies will be costly and may create significant stress on the projected world economic and energy systems. Technological options have been evaluated to a modest degree. These range from conventional emission control approaches to geo-engineering opportunities and biospheric carbon management. To be practical, these options need to be developed further and demonstrated to properly assess their operational characteristics.

A global electronic imaging and distribution system employing a computer network

BACKGROUND Conventional silver halide photography has been used successfully for over one hundred years and remains unsurpassed in quality and fidelity for recording and displaying image information. During the past decade the impact of computers on all fields of information sciences has been both profound and widespread. Recently, personal computers have been acknowledged as effective and efficient tools for assuming the role of conventional photography. A simple, rapid, and well-established system was in place at Unilever to distribute the written word (electronic mail), however, no system was available to manage and distribute scientific images. An inordinate amount of time was elapsing between the time images were formed and when our colleagues viewed them Also, imaging scientists were spending an excessive amount of time in the darkroom developing and printing images. The Unilever Global Electronic Imaging and Distribution System was developed to address these growing problems.SYSTEM CONFIGURATION The configuration of the Unilever System is depicted in Figure 1. It consists of a restricted LAN (local area network) which isolates imaging traffic for optimal speed. This communication network still allows communication to the site LAN via the hub and Ethernet backbone and vice versa. The hub is an intelligent network controller that isolates network traffic.

Shipper's councils: role and responsibility—a western view

Traditionally, liner markets have been seen as dominated by conferences on the seller side, facing small, unorganized shippers onn the buyers' side. This perceived asymmetry has greatly influenced conference legislation in North America (and more recently in the E.U.) and it has been deemed essential that government should regulate conference activities in order to curb any abuse of ‘conference power’. In this view, shipowners and shippers are adversaries engaged in a zero-sum battle over transport costs rather than potential or actual partners in global distribution systems. This paper suggests that in today's global markets much can be achieved by cooperationn in the development of logistics systems and that shipowners and shippers may have much to gain from such cooperative alliances. A survey of shippers' councils in 1991–1992 demonstrates the diversity and increasing sophistication of many national shippers' councils, which devote themselves to the task of improving markets through education and the legislative process. The situation in the U.S.A. is different: for legal reasons, conventional shippers' councils do not exist. Instead, ‘shippers’ associations' play a commercial role in liner markets. It is suggested that European style shippers' councils can and should play an important role in the development and formulation of policies for internatinal liner markets. Such participation requires a cooperative industry environment quite different from the traditional adversarial approach, which is ill suited to global trade and logistics alliances.

Marketing Hotels

Although travel agents will continue to book hotel rooms via telephone using information in published guides, more and more rooms will be booked electronically via global distribution systems. By creating and maintaining a proper listing on a GDS, hoteliers enable travel agents to make quicker and, in many cases, more accurate reservations. The hotelier should make certain that the listing has the appropriate key words to indicate the hotel's location (e.g., airport, tourist attractions) and a proper description. A key to making sure the travel agent will rely on the GDS listing is to ensure that the rates offered electronically are complete, accurate, the lowest available. Although a majority of hotel bookings are not yet completed via computer, the day is fast approaching when that will be the case.

Using global distribution systems

Hotel operators can gain room sales via the “silicon highway” by making certain their electronic listings for travel agents are complete and up-to-date. Moreover, in the near future, guests will make direct bookings via their own computers

Summary of characteristics of beamed power radiation patterns and side lobe levels for the lunar solar power system

The lunar solar power system (LSP) is a system for collecting solar radiant power on the lunar surface, converting the power to microwaves, and transmitting multiple power beams directly (or indirectly using orbital reflectors) to Earth stations. The microwave transmission systems for LSP direct beams consist of phased arrays of randomly placed reflector antennas distributed over large diameter equivalent apertures near the lunar limbs, each aperture generating multiple radiating wave fronts of different frequencies converging toward equivalent focal points beyond the Earth surface receiver planes. Unlike most versions of the space solar power system (SPS), the radiation patterns are governed by radiative near field or Fresnel diffraction constraints and provide a more uniform intensity over most of the receiver ground area and more rapid attenuation beyond the beam collection zone than is possible with Fraunhofer diffraction limited power beams. Statistical theories for radiation patterns of random arrays and phase or amplitude errors of reflector antennas have been described. These are combined to predict mean and peak side lobe power levels. Central beam power distributions are calculated from transmitting wavefront curvature and amplitude distributions. Parametric values for single power beams and mature global power distribution systems are presented for beaming power to receivers on Earth.